Simone Weil’s interpretation of the Iliad

The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to…

To define force - it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercise to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; thi is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us…

The death of Hector

All around, his black hair

Was spread; in the dust his whole head lay,

That once-charming head; now Zeus had let his enemies

Defile it on his native soil.

…

His soul, fleeing his limbs, passed to Hades,

Mourning its fate, forsaking its youth and vigour.

…

She ordered her bright-haired maids in the palace

To place on the fire a large tripod, preparing

A hot bath for Hector, returning from battle.

Foolish woman! Already he lay, far from hot baths,

Slain by grey-eyed Athena, who guided Achilles’ arm.

When Priam goes to see Hector

No one saw great Priam enter. He stopped

Clasped the knees of Achilles, kissed his hands,

Those terrible man-killing hands that had slaughtered so many of his sons.

…

As when harsh misfortune strikes a man if in his own country

He has killed a man, and arrives at last at someone else’s door,

The door of a rich man; a shudder seizes those who see him.

So Achilles shuddered to see divine Priam;

The others shuddered too, looking one at the other.

He spoke. The other, remembering his own father, longed to weep;

Taking the old man’s arm, he pushed him away.

Both were remembering. Thinking of Hector, killer of men,

Priam wept, abased at the feet of Achilles.

But Achilles wept, now for his father,

Now for Patroclus. And their sobs resounded through the house.

Anybody who is in our vicinity exercises a certain power over us by his very presence, and a power that belongs to him alone, that is, the power of halting, repressing, modifying each movement that our body sketches out. If we step aside for a passer-by on the road, it is not the same thing as stepping aside to avoid a billboard; alone in our rooms, we get up, walk about, sit down again quite differently from the way we do when we have a visitor. But this indefinable influence that the presence of another human being has on us is not exercised by men whom a moment of impatience can deprive of life, who can die before even thought has a chance to pass sentence on them. In their presence, people move about as if they were not there; they, on their side, running the risk of being reduced to nothing in a single instant, imitate nothingness in their own persons. Pushed, they fall. Fallen, they lie where they are, unless chance gives somebody the idea of raising them up again.